The Likud party on Sunday filed a criminal complaint with the police demanding an investigation of former Prime Minister Ehud Barak for statements he made from the podium at an anti-government demonstration in Tel Aviv “whose content constitutes crimes of incitement, sedition, and damage to law and order.”
Among other things, Barak told an audience of about 10,000 protesters: “We must intensify the struggle and resort to civil disobedience. I call on every citizen to prepare himself for this test of civil disobedience, and to answer the call when it comes.”
According to the complaint, “Barak tried, to be sure, to disguise the criminality of his statements with the phrases ‘non-violent,’ and ‘civil disobedience,’ but these phrases do not change the specific essence of the act which is a call to disobey the law, to violence, and the violation of the government and social order in the country.”
“Mr. Barak’s call to citizens not to obey the law expresses an anarchist consciousness, which does not recognize the idea at the foundation of the democratic state – the duty of citizens to obey the law. The examples from the past that Mr. Barak brought about the disobedience of the law are not at all similar to the case before us, where the motive for calling for disobedience of the law is the former prime minister’s failure to recognize the results of democratic elections for the legislature and his failure to recognize the Knesset’s right to enact laws,” the complaint said.
Barak compared his call to insurrection to exulted individuals such as Mahatma Gandhi, Rosa Parks, and Martin Luther King. However, the Likud complaint did not include a demand to have the former PM checked for megalomania.
The complaint offered several earlier incidents in which Barak had called for disobedience, including urging his audience to refuse to pay taxes.
In May 1999, Barak defeated incumbent PM Benjamin Netanyahu and put together a coalition of left-wing and religious parties (including the three religious parties in the current coalition). His government was rife with scandals, such as his deputy PM being forced to resign over a sex scandal. He also got into fights with his religious coalition partners, and in the end, when it became clear that his would be the shortest government in Israel’s history, PM Barak launched a last-ditch effort to separate religion from the state, which he named a “Civil Revolution,” complete with country-wide public transportation on Shabbat.
During his year and eight months at the helm (July 6, 1999-March 7, 2001), Barak orchestrated a shameful escape from South Lebanon, abandoning Israel’s allies there to the mercy of Hezbollah; and met with Yasser Arafat in Camp David to offer him a Palestinian State with eastern Jerusalem as its capital. Arafat refused and, as had been expected, launched the second intifada.
